Tools Social Media Gurus Use

In his book, “We Think: The Power of Mass Creativity”, Charles Lead-beater noted that “You are what you share.” referring to how branding and marketing landscapes are changing because of the vital role social media plays in our lives.

The way we connect with each other, communicate and socialize is changing in characteristics and purpose as new platforms and communication channels are emanating and existing platforms are emerging with new advanced capabilities. Social media marketing experts, in response to changes, keep developing innovative ways to promoting and popularizing messages and creating fans and supporters.

The question here is how professionals can become social media experts and what are the tools that social media gurus use to grab the attention of their audience, engage them and keep the level of excitement as high as possible and monitor the results of their efforts.

In my quest to master the art of employing social media to create the buzz for my clients and the e-magazine that I manage, I have tested many tools. In this article, I will share with you five social media tools top social media experts use that you can use and high gear your social media and your e-branding efforts in 2016.

Buffer

Buffer comes at the top of my list of tools as I value virtual teams. Managing virtual teams myself, I recognize the value of having a fully distributed team … simply; they work around the clock to solve clients’ problems such as fixing bugs, responding to inquiries and providing technical support.

Buffer’s team pride themselves that they live and work at places that make them happy. To me, this means that their organizational culture is amazing like their products and services.

Buffer has a simple interface, which makes it easy to use and allows you to handle several social accounts, schedule and share posts across several networks through a centralized dashboard.

Another feature that made Buffer at the top of my list is the Chrome extension that enables you to share your contents on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and Pinterest all at the same time.

For the not-so-experienced user, there are tons of step-by-step guides, tutorials, and cases that will upgrade your knowledge and polish your digital marketing skills.

Canvas

When you manage e-magazine like I do, you will be in constant need to edit photos, create banners and posters and revamp your web page and social media networks with images that speak a thousand words.

When your graphic design skills are modest, and your budget is low, Canvas is your secret weapon to creating dazzling designs with utmost ease. Canvas provides users with hundreds of templates (most of them are free), royalty free photos, and other elements that will revamp your design in a drag-and-drop easy step.

With Canva, you do need to download or setup any application, and the most important amazing feature is that it is free and even if you decide to invest – a little – most of paid designs and photos are $1 each.

Edgar

Edgar is the best friend of our Community Manager; she cannot stop praising it. She came with the strategy of recycling our older posts, to allow more people to engage with our popular articles. Edgar allowed us to frequently repost our older contents to allow our new followers to read our amazing stories.

Some of the features that make Edgar an amazing tool preferred by social media gurus are its smart capability to categorize and group contents based on topic targeted audience and the suitable time to share throughout the day. Such analytical capabilities guarantee the highest engagement with our fans. Posts are arranged in a queue that allows posts to be re-added to the end of the queue to be shared later. This way with no hassle, Edgar gives you an endless supply of posts and updates that will make your fans fully engaged with your social media channel.

Feedly

Some contents created and shared on the World Wide Web is tremendous, and you need an army of social media and digital marketers to keep up with it. That’s why at Corporate Magazine we started to use Feedly to gather information and latest updates from our favorite websites, blogs, writers, influencers and news channels. This way, we receive our customized newspaper or magazine at our fingertips.

Since we started using Feedly, we managed to stay up to date with trends in the niche topics, industries and fields we focus on. No only this, we became more informed about events organized in specific territories and our reporters managed to attend many of them.

As your social media strategy might include curating important updates from niche industries, integrating Feedly with your scheduling tool (such as Buffer) will enable you to schedule and share this curated contents directly when you are scheduling other updates and contents.

Social Clout

I believe that what gets measured gets managed … and what gets managed gets improved. I am a big fan of analytics as it allows me to understand the big picture of our digital branding efforts. To be able to understand your audience you need to monitor what they liked and shared, Social Clout enables you to do so by tracking engagements on your social media platforms and defining valuable parameters such as demographics and conversion rates on different platforms. Learning your metrics using Social Clout will allow you to budget right and increase you Return On Investment (ROI).

In the end, I’d like to emphasize that you can master your brand by observing how social media expert manages their marketing and branding processes and learning which tools they use. Give yourself to learn about and try different tools. Once you feel comfortable using a tool, you will be able to monitor your e-presence and tweak your social media strategy and tactics until you reach the desired outcome as most of the people would like to be.

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